![]() It's highly stressful, in all the right ways. This isn't politics as jolly hockey sticks, it's politics as a fight against rapid entropy. It evokes the panic and precariousness of the financial crisis in Britain (the US and other nations will be added later), the desperate sense that whoever winds up in Downing Street to try and fix it is very much inheriting a poison chalice. Well, a politician, but same difference, right?Īll snark aside, Democracy 3 is very much a game of its time. The power of Democracy 3 is that it'll rip your soul right out of you, but without convincing you that your beliefs are actually wrong. A way to make things better, to get through the recession, to solve unemployment, to be popular enough to survive even though the rich had to forsake their fourth houses. Somewhere, in Democracy 3's initially overwhelming but careful and slick matrix of numbers, sliders and modifiers, taxes and subsidies, policies and injustices, there was surely a way. ![]() To see this content please enable targeting cookies.Įntirely understandably, the people voted me out at the end of my first turn, but while that spelled obscurity for that prime minister character, it grew my own determination. I'd like to take this opportunity to put a few things straight. I became the ashen-faced, sad-eyed, word-breaking, forever compromising leader of the UK Coalition government's junior partner. ![]() Today, I suffered one of my all-time gaming lows. Back before we rather ran out of retro tales, we talked often of our all-time gaming highs on RPS. I was barely a year into my first term by the point I'd thrown most of my beliefs to the wind and was trying almost anything to appease the whinging middle and the greedy posh or worse, simply to pull more money into the implacable maw that was the national deficit. ![]() I went in with a pretty fixed idea of what I hoped to achieve and what I'd come to believe after years of reading liberal media and saying 'if they'd only do this now then that'll happen later' from the comfort of my armchair/Twitter client. That's the maths, but the other and perhaps more affecting aspect of the game is the morality simulation. Can it ever possibly work, is there any balance, some perfect set of numbers? I don't know, but I can't very well just give up, can I? But the middle class will be furious that their iPads cost more, foreign investors might shy away and quite frankly it'll all go to hell in a half-dozen ways you probably hadn't expected.Īnother example - hybrid cars and alternative energy sources are all jolly nice on paper, but what possible use are they if they can't bandage up a nation's bleeding budget right away? All these groups and sub-groups of people, all with their different needs, so many so contrary to what others desire. Raise luxury goods tax, for instance, and you'll see the nation's deficit reduce somewhat, the socialists and poor will cheer you on and, in theory, there'll be more emphasis on domestic rather than international products. I will presume it's maths based on research rather than wild speculation, but in any case it's game built upon a vast array of adjustable numbers, each of which has cause and effect on at least half a dozen other numbers. Perhaps the most immediately striking thing about Positech's latest government sim is that it's full of maths. Professor Brian Cox and his mates were dead wrong. I tried to help them all, and they all hated me for it. The socialists and greens cheered me, sure, but that didn't matter a jot as the nation's money haemorrhaged its last, and the public understandably voted for the other guy. The middle-class hated me, the rich abused every tax loophole they could find, the poor took to alcohol abuse and crime. I tried to think long-term, but I also fought seemingly endless short-term fires. I compromised my own values and I punished people who were just like me, I scrimped and I saved and I took desperate actions. I really did want to make Britain a better, happier place for everyone. I've been playing an early, unfinished version of Positech Game's government sim/political strategy game Democracy 3.
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